Sylvester Walker Barnhart
Sylvester Walker was born in 1854 to Rev. John and Nancy Lambert Barnhart.
Sylvester married Amanda Kunkleman in November 1878 in Allen County OH. The two
children of that marriage apparently died young; Onetta was less than 1 year old.
Amanda died in a typhoid epidemic June 1, 1888 that also took the remaining child,
Murlen; and in October, Sylvester married a divorcee, Mariah
Jones, brought her west during the winter, and settled in Egypt, a small
community north of Davenport, WA. We suppose it was due to family pressures,
with Amanda "barely cold in the ground" yadda yadda yadda, and he did not
want Mariah to put up with the grief the family was giving them. Whatever their
reasons, they never communicated with their families nor told their children
anything about their roots. (But for a persistent genealogist, Neva Baar,
descendant of Sylvester's brother Virgil, we would never have known anything at all!)
Sylvester and Mariah show up in the Washington Territory census of 1889, taken in
preparation for statehood, along with Mariah's son Harry.
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Sylvester Walker Barnhart
Photo in Lima,
OH, sometime prior to 1889
Sylvester chose some of the poorest land in the Egypt area, as one of
his sons put it, "so poor you couldn't raise a disturbance." (There is still
a mystery: it is rumored that he came West to homestead some years earlier.
We are still looking for the evidence.) Sylvester had two nicknames,
"Southwest" (for S.W.) and "Big George". Big George had to support the
family by working off the "farm".
One afternoon, Sylvester was working outside along with his son Dee. Dee saw
a cloud moving rapidly across the sky and pointed it out to his father.
Sylvester said, "Run for the house, it's going to blow!" And sure enough,
the wind started to howl around the house. Most of the kids normally slept
in the loft.
Mariah said that they should come down and sleep on the floor. The
wind was shaking the house so bad that things were falling off the table and
shelves; Sylvester danced around catching things as they fell to distract the
kids so they wouldn't be so frightened. He sang songs and told stories. Later
that night, a tree fell across the house, right into the loft; it would have
killed 2 or 3 of them.
Sylvester worked at least part of the time as a carpenter. The homestead
did not produce any crops and so it was necessary for him to work at
some other job.
In 1911, he was killed in a terrible railroad accident near Long Lake
Dam. He was a carpenter, but the boss told him to ride the little train,
pushed by a "dinky" engine, out to load some logs. The cars were fastened
together with ropes and the tracks and ties were simply laid on the ground
with no roadbed, all of which caused the ride to be exceedingly rough. The newspaper
account of the accident indicates that he was riding on the front of the
train and fell off. Both legs, one arm and his head were severed. (Small
wonder the family would never talk about it.) In 1921, the family was awarded
$4000.00 in a wrongful death suit against Washington Water Power.
At the time of Sylvester's death, his eldest living son, Dee,
began working to support the family at age 15.
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Sylvester on the job, third from left, circa 1900
